Do you have anything better to do with your money? Than don't grab this expansion pack.
No one knows who it happened but, somehow Blizzard was too busy with Diablo 2 and Adventures of Warcraft to give a damn about Diablo's expansion pack so Sierra thought they should take up the duty of becoming expansioneers. They sucked at it.
Graphics: 7/10
Diablo: Hellfire does all it can to add to the graphics engine of Diablo, but for the most part, it fails. The expansion pack has prettier looking explosions, more voluminous lighting and a very detailed tile set, but it came one year after the original so the least they could do was give us higher resolution.
On top of not trying to hard, the new levels are hit and miss. The Crypt is like the original church levels; just slightly more graphically complex. The new Hive levels, on the other hand, lack the complexity of even the simplest Diablo levels. They're just basically green with brown and shades of both in a totally disorganized fashion. The monster animations are mostly forgettable, with only a few exceptions such as the Crypt's Orbs.
Sound: 5/10
This is another category in which Hellfire doesn't try too hard.
The music in the two new levels is boring and instantly forgettable. Besides its abysmally low quality it is just a simple combination of ambient sounds tied together by a flimsy keyboard note.
The sound effects don't fare all that much better, but it is clear that Sierra put some more thought into making them. The sounds of the Hive's insect-like creatures dying and the sparks of the lighting surrounding the Orbs are all pretty well made. The voice acting on the other hand is horrible, especially that of the Defiler's "robotic" voice. It's been done dead for the past 20 years let the robotic voice die.
Gameplay: 7/10
It's not so much as what Hellfire doesn't do as it is what it takes out of Diablo that hurts this game: Without multiplayer, all of the items and monsters this game throws at you are nearly useless.
For those of you who don't know what Diablo is about, allow me to sum it up: "MEEE SAAAASSSH!!!” That's all, you go around dungeons killing everything that moves and then you come back out and buy/sell weapons or talk to village folks to more quests or more rewards for your efforts.
What really made Diablo such a stand out game was that it was an action RPG with soul. You cared for the characters: Cain, the Peg-legged boy, even Griswold the greedy blacksmith. There was a world here that was genuinely scared at what was going on a few meters from their town. There was a story that was surprising to listen too and that had more than its fair share of plot twists. Hellfire doesn't have any of this.
Hellfire's main goal seems to be to let you level up your character(s), so it offers you a plethora of new challenges. Most of those challenges have nothing to do with the new levels. As ironic as this is, the new levels are virtually useless to high-level characters. If you finished the original, going through these levels is a breeze. Only the last 2 levels of the Crypt are more acceptable in terms of difficulty.
However, where the game really shines is in that it gives you a choice between 3 infamous difficulty levels: Normal, Nightmare, and Hell. These difficulty levels are really where most of the characters, which finished the original, should spend their time. They are infinitely more challenging than normal-level Crypt and Hive levels and they offer better drops.
The monster drops in Hellfire also seem to be seriously halted, especially in the new areas. Back in the day, I think I had at least a dozen characters pass through the Hive and Crypt levels and I didn't have a SINGLE unique drop on me. That's really bad considering some of the items in Hellfire are extremely powerful and rare, including the famous among Diablo players, Putrid Cowleg which was something of a myth.
Hell, most new items in Hellfire were myths because, other than that one Cow-armor, I never found a single new expansion type item. Yeah, sure there were runes, but they acted like traps and they soon became useless. There were also new spells, but the high level ones were, again impossible to find. And as for the rest of the items? Like I said, I never even got to see ONE of the items proudly displayed on the back of the box.
The monster and level design fared much better than the rest of the game. The new insect-like creatures of the Hive were big and nasty, but they were poorly animated and the color palette of the Hive was made up of 3 colors. The Crypt fared much better, with tons of original, cool looking, monsters such as the orbs and phantoms or the new minotaur-like Death Knights.
Hellfire also introduces a new class: The Monk. This guy is an expert martial artist (wonder which FF they ripped that from?) and he can attack many enemies at once using his powerful staff. He's also an expert magician and, very, very unbalanced. The Monk was, much like the Assassin and Druid were for D2: LoD, a highly overpowered class that was quickly thrown out the door along with the expansion. His skill caps ran in the hundreds for each of his stats, he could wear heavy armor AND cast spells like a mage, etc. Balance was out the window.
Among these major changes Hellfire also offered a bunch of smaller, but equally important, changes. For one, you could now jog instead of simply walking around in town. You could also, using a spell, see the faint outlines of items that had dropped among hundreds of corpses or see that exit you've been looking for an hour. This "Sense" spell was made available to Monks from the start while everyone else had to go find it. The game also had a few extra subquests, but they were mostly just for show as half-of-them needed to be activated using a hack.
As a final note, Sierra chose to make it nearly impossible for players to move their characters from one game to the other, so most players spent huge amounts of time trying to just play the game with their old characters. In the end though, it was still Diablo... almost.
Multiplayer: 0/10
When you go out of your way to try to REMOVE something that's already in a game, you cannot expect the gamer to be happy.
With the removal of multiplayer Hellfire becomes a complete failure. Without this genius contraption it makes this expansion of one of the most popular online games ever, a total waste of money. A crappy expansion is not worth your online game, ever!
Overall: 5/10
Its still Diablo all right, but it's Sierra's version. If this game would've kept the multiplayer and the more refined mechanics of its grandfather, it would easily have scored much higher universally.